Trump v. Trump

Our books have discussed Trump's low character, which was on display this month At times, his crudeness has helped him appear transgressive.  Lately, it has hurt him

Trump is undercutting his own campaign messages. Sophia Cai at Axios:

Zoom in: This week, his campaign debuted a Pennsylvania mail-in voting website for a program called "Swamp the Vote," aimed at boosting GOP turnout in swing states.The same day, Trump called mail-in voting "terrible" during an interview with "Dr. Phil" McGraw.

"We want to get rid of mail-in voting," Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania on Friday, adding to the mixed messages coming from his campaign. Some Republicans, egged on by Trump, have associated mail-in voting with voter fraud — despite a lack of evidence.

For months, Trump's team has been training field volunteers to get out the Republican vote.But Trump is making clear he doesn't care as much about their efforts as he does "election integrity" — a push aimed in part at justifying his false claims that he lost the 2020 election only because of fraud. "Our primary focus is not to get out the vote — but to make sure they don't cheat," Trump said last week.
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The ex-president continues to lean into personal attacks, despite his advisers' repeated efforts to get him to focus more on issues.They're writing policy proposals into his speeches, and pushing policy ideas on social media and in a daily campaign newsletter, Palm Beach Playbook.

Trump frequently deviates from prepared remarks to ask those at his rallies which nicknames he should give his opponents. Mispronouncing Harris' first name is a constant feature of his rallies. He's begun calling her "Comrade Kamala."

In North Carolina during the Democratic convention, Trump complained: "They always say, 'Sir, please stick to policy, don't get personal ... You'll win it on the border. You'll win it with inflation. You'll win it with your great military that you built.'"

He then did a "free poll" of the crowd: "Should I get personal, or should I not get personal?" The MAGA crowd roared, wanting more vintage Trump.

"My advisers are fired!" he joked at a time when he's brought back past advisers such as Corey Lewandowski.

How Do Republicans Plan to Govern?

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.

Republicans are likely to win the House. What then?  Megan McArdle at WP:

How do Republicans plan to govern? The GOP needs a positive program for reducing inflation, fighting crime, reforming health care, keeping entitlements solvent and boosting employment. The party also desperately needs the administrative capacity to get a recalcitrant civil service to carry out its plans. Without those things, the GOP will fail voters and quickly lose power again.

Republicans might retort that they’re winning, aren’t they? Why not ride cultural antitrust to power, then worry about the rest when they get there?

Donald Trump’s whole presidency testifies to the dangers of running hard on emotional issues, without policy substance behind it: He left having accomplished almost nothing that could not be undone by an unfriendly judge or the stroke of a Democratic successor’s pen. The notable exception was the conservative judges he appointed — notable because it involved a concrete political goal (appoint these judges!), enabled by decades of work by conservative legal scholars who built up a law-school-to-judiciary pipeline.
That’s exactly the kind of patient work Republicans are not doing, on cultural issues or anything else. If Republicans want to change things, or even to hold office for more than a few years, they need to prepare to run the federal government, not just yell about the things they’d do if only they’d been elected governor, or king.

Policy Plagiarism

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the early stages of the 2016 campaign, when many candidates were unknowns.  The update  -- recently published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.  We are now in the early stages of the 2020 race.

Natasha  Korecki and Marc Caputo at Politico:

Twenty-four hours after Joe Biden’s campaign was taken to task for lifting portions of a climate change plan without citation, it’s clear that the former vice president has plenty of company.

A sampling of policy proposals from Biden’s leading rivals suggests the lifting of direct text from academic papers, think tanks or policy institutes — and the cribbing of facts without attribution — is fairly widespread on 2020 campaign websites.

A POLITICO review found previously published material on the official campaign websites of Sens. Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders, as well as frequent use of facts and data without citation on a number of others.

"More than 1 million women in America today have been shot or shot at by an intimate partner,“ Harris writes under the gender equality section of her website.

Everytown, the gun safety group, has a remarkably similar line on its own site, with one minor difference in scale: “Nearly 1 million women alive today have been shot, or shot at, by an intimate partner."